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Archive for April, 2011

Mockup :: GNOME3 and YaST

April 30th, 2011 by

With the release of GNOME3 I would assume that people are interested in seeing how YaST2 (suggestion: rename it to YaST3 !!) is going to take form with GTK3. Of course this means eventually writing another application in GTK3, hopefully different from the old gnome-control-panel ‘style’ which was actually pretty confusion from the user point of view as it was far too close to gnome-control-center, thus confusing new comers.

My suggestion (unaware if it’s possible or not) was probably to explore GNOME3 features to serve YaST integrated already with GNOME3. This could be an interesting approach as it would offer integration and some advantages:

* Better integration with GNOME3 without having to write(/maintain another application;
* Take advantage of YaST2 modular structure;
* Present YaST in a prime space in GNOME3, thus offering a openSUSE differentiation point;
* No conflicts with possible KDE existing front-ends for YaST2;
* Improve users experience.

My proposal would be something like (maybe to be served as an extension for gnome-shell). Please neglect my ‘lame’ photo manipulation skills:

Mockup: YaST2 on GNOME3

subversion with libserf

April 26th, 2011 by

I packaged subversion to built against libserf in addition to neon. This adds a second repository access module to handle http and https schemes with potential improvements. To enable, install the packages from my home repository See updated package location.

To enable, adjust your ~/.subversion/servers file:


[global]
http-library = serf

Beyond this, the package tracks the package from devel:tools:scm:svn.

The ‘DreamChess’ incident!

April 25th, 2011 by

Today I was reading the openSUSE forums and found an interesting thread on the ‘Games’ section, from which I quote:

I remember playing DreamChess on Ubuntu, but the one is not available for Suse 11.4 KDE.

I’ve taken a look around, gathered the stuff required and made a quick package of this game, thus pushing it forward to the games repository. Within a few minutes of the submission, the package was approved and it’s ready to be served to the masses.

We can’t leave transitioning users from Ubuntu unhappy can we ?! Once more thanks to Dimstar and Prusnak for the quick answer in getting this package into the games repository.

DreamChess 0.2.0 on openSUSE 11.4 with GNOME3

Fosscomm 2011 in Patras – Greece

April 25th, 2011 by

Fosscomm 2011

The event will take place in Patras this year. For those of you who don’t know, fosscomm is one of the major foss event in Greece.

I’ll go there and will make a presentation :
Amazing openSUSE : we, you, together a promizing future!

I hope to see all of you there! Come and meet the growing openSUSE Greek community, and most of the Greek ambassadors.

Follow them on Twitter. The official hashtag of FOSSCOMM 2011 is: #fosscomm2011

Official Patras city website

PS: The websites is also available in english 🙂

Talk

Title :

Amazing openSUSE
We, you, together a promising future !

Talk Audience

general public, which would like to contribute in FOSS

No special IT knowledge is required.

Abstract

openSUSE project is open: there’s a place for everybody!

Come and (re)discover one of the oldest Linux distribution and one of the most youngest community.

This talk is about the community powering the whole actual openSUSE Project :

We will overfly openSUSE’s history, and the actual projects like open-build-service, susestudio, tumbleweed, evergreen, connect, openqa, and the near future a word about the openSUSE Foundation.

Follow us deeper inside with examples how collaboration works between contributors, users, across the borders with others distributions and upstream projects.

Want to be part of? Let’s talk about the “right” place for you!

 

Where our bugzilla needs improvement

April 15th, 2011 by

update 2012-02-07: Success: after bnc#732504 you can now open Advanced Search and find RESOLVED/DUPLICATE bugs by default. When bugs are finally solved and fixes released, those can then be moved to CLOSED state to no more appear in search results.

 

bugzilla.novell.com aka bnc is the central tool to track bugs of openSUSE.

It has a guided bug submission form that helps & encourages reporters to search for existing reports on an issue.

However, the integrated search function only shows open bugs. In principle that is nice, but bugs marked as duplicates of open bugs do not count as open. Also it is common that developers mark a bug as RESOLVED/FIXED as soon as they uploaded a patch into the OBS devel-project. Such a patch then needs some days until it gets into Factory or the Update repos where normal users would benefit from the fix. During that time, there will still be people with all regular updates installed hitting the bug and not finding it on bugzilla because it is no more marked open. Of course, one could also search for RESOLVED bugs, but this brings up a huge list of issues that are long solved, but never were marked CLOSED (e.g. openSUSE-11.3 has 453 CLOSED vs 2727 RESOLVED).

This wastes time of reporters writing a duplicate bug-report and wastes time of developers having to figure out that it really is a dup. This is probably why other projects recommend setting bugs to ASSIGNED/FIXED until the patch is released. Unfortunately bnc lacks this state.

Also bugzilla has an UNCONFIRMED state for new bugs that need triaging to get into the NEW state (named “Reproducible but not assigned” in other projects). Such a state is unavailable on bnc, so that people can not tell apart bugs that have been forgotten from bugs that are known to exist, but just wait for a developer to fix.

There was also little integration between OBS and bnc. I have therefore written scripts to update bugzilla entries with links to submit requests on OBS mentioning e.g. bnc#685133 (<=see link for how it looks like). But it still could be made a lot more useful.

Overall, there is some room for improvement to make people’s lives easier, and allow us having a lot of fun…

Calibre Repository Moved

April 15th, 2011 by

Maybe not everybody knows it or it may be a bit too late, but nevertheless… the Calibre repository on home:thomas-schraitle:calibre has been moved to Documentation:Tools. It was necessary due to some internal reorganisation. The new location is now the official devel project.

Have fun! 🙂

Gnome3 launch party @ Zürich report

April 10th, 2011 by

Gnome3 launch party in Zürich, April 8th 2011

ETHZ building

A group of 20 people met in ETHZ F26.3 room Friday afternoon (3pm to 7pm). To assist the Gnome 3 Launch party. We were expecting more people, but a so sunny weather, and a Monday off in Zürich doesn’t help to keep people inside after a long winter. 🙂

Marcus Moeller showed us a deep overview of the whole Gnome 3 desktop, with the strength and weakness (non yet finished features or controversial ones).

Then there’s some talks about features, what will happen unity/ubuntu/gnome etc …

On my side I did a late presentation about what’s openSUSE project is, and its associated SUPER COOL tools like OBS and susestudio.
It was supposed to last 15 minutes long. I was asked only Tuesday night to do it! But in fact we spend more than half an hour demoing obs and susestudio. Really was cool to do.

openSUSE project presentation

A special thanks to Biju Gopi Thilaka for setting up that party.

Biju Gopi was kind enough to share his slides with us, so keep reading …

(more…)

GNOME3 iso by fcrozat and ATI radeon driver… a quick easy fix!

April 10th, 2011 by

Hi all,

For some time I wanted to check out GNOME3 and gnome-shell… My current chipset is ATI M92 RV710 and while the thermal performance with the proprietary driver is somewhat what I expect, the open source radeon driver does overheat my laptop a lot compared to flgrx. For the time being, fglrx isn’t really a choice because it just borgs the ‘activities’ bar on top… And until ATI fixes their driver, there’s no other choice than running with the standard radeon drm driver, which does provide a very pleasant experience with GNOME3 / gnome-shell.

For all that matters, KMS is to be enabled, period, full stop. And from this point… we have two options regarding power management:

1. Dynamic Frequency switching (not really working for me);
2. Profile based frequency switching (does provide what I need);

For all that matters regarding ‘profile based frequency switching’ we have 5 profiles available:

  • “default” uses the default clocks and does not change the power state. This is the default behavior.
  • “auto” selects between “mid” and “high” power states based on the whether the system is on battery power or not. The “low” power state are selected when the monitors are in the dpms off state.
  • “low” forces the gpu to be in the low power state all the time. Note that “low” can cause display problems on some laptops; this is why auto only uses “low” when displays are off.
  • “mid” forces the gpu to be in the “mid” power state all the time. The “low” power state is selected when the monitors are in the dpms off state.
  • “high” forces the gpu to be in the “high” power state all the time. The “low” power state is selected when the monitors are in the dpms off state.

Now, what I did might not be an option to everyone, but for sure it does provide a nice solution for my problem… So be mindful of that… this is a personal preference based on the fact that I don’t require intensive GPU usage, neither I run intensive GPU requiring applications within GNOME3/gnome-shell (I have a normal openSUSE 11.4 with GNOME 2.32.x with fglrx dual boot config for those apps).

The first thing we might want to do is to switch to profile based frequency switching… how do we this? As root:

[code] echo profile > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method[/code]

Now we have to pick one of those 5 profiles… and since I’ve already stated… I want the ‘low’ profile since I don’t really do much intensive GPU work…

[code] echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile[/code]

Now… you might want to check out the different profiles and the different clocks used… this can be done through:

[code] cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info[/code]

and will report something like this:

[code]linux-331w:~ # cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/radeon_pm_info
default engine clock: 680000 kHz
current engine clock: 299530 kHz
default memory clock: 800000 kHz
current memory clock: 249750 kHz
voltage: 900 mV
PCIE lanes: 16[/code]

This one is using the ‘low’ profile… Feel free to test stuff around and find which one better answers your needs… Also there’s far more that can be done… I hope this helps ATI users with DRM driver to bring out the best of your system and improves your GNOME3 / gnome-shell experience, at so that you can run it with good thermal performance without fglrx.

NM

openSUSE 11.4 & cheat sheet poster + dvd in Linux Magazine

April 9th, 2011 by

If you don’t get it already our 11.4 DVD and a great double faced poster are here
Linux-Maganize issue 126
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Versionitis

April 6th, 2011 by

The voting on how to do the versioning is over and the “old school” has won by 55 per cent (of 98 participants). Thanks to all that participated in the two votes and the discussion around the topic.

As Coolo said in on the project list,  we’d like to make a small change to the numbering:

We will not have a .0 release but only .1, .2, .3 release. Since we have releases in three months, the November
release is always the .1 release, the July release the .2 and the March release the .3.

So, the plan is that the next release will be called openSUSE 12.1 and launched on the 10th of November, 2011! Two years later – on the 14th of November, 2013 – we will then have the openSUSE 13.1 release.

So, the next four releases are called:

  • November 2011: openSUSE 12.1
  • July 2012: openSUSE 12.2
  • March 2013: openSUSE 12.3
  • November 2013: openSUSE 13.1

Detailed results for logged-in openSUSE members are available at the connect poll page and I have reproduced them here as well:

  • A: “old school”: Like currently but only counting the right number until 3:
    55% (54 votes)
  • B: “Fedora style”: Just integers:
    29 % (28 votes)
  • C: “Ubuntu style”: YY.MM:
    16 % (16 votes)

This is also consistent with the results of the first public voting.

Note that openSUSE does not have a major and minor numbering, even if it seems so. There is right now no difference in any way between what we would do for openSUSE 11.4 or 12.0 or 12.1 – and no sense to speak about openSUSE 11 or openSUSE 11 family. We also had in the past no process on how to name the next release (when to increase which parts of the number).

I think this new versioning is still consistent with the old one but also an improvement since it’s now clear that we change the first digit every two year. The first poll showed that half of our users prefer a date based versioning and the other a consecutive numbering. So, depending on your point of view, you can see this as a mixture of both or as consecutive numbering 😉

So, time now to make openSUSE 12.1 a great release!